


R.E.S.P.A.W.N.

by texastoasted



Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-02
Updated: 2019-01-25
Packaged: 2019-06-20 18:07:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15539970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/texastoasted/pseuds/texastoasted
Summary: A Gravel War is brewing. For it to boil over, the backbone of it all needs to be finished. The R.E.S.P.A.W.N. system is revolutionary technology that helps men cheat death time and time again, but behind it all is the story of the woman who got chip crumbs in the circuit boards. An OC fic.





	1. Chapter 1

Sun gazed at the smoke curling in a plump plume out of a businessman’s cigarette on the train platform and, for a half-second, contemplated leaving her seat and getting one. She would miss the train, and if she didn’t buy a ticket immediately for the next one to New Mexico, no one might know where she was for a while. 

She only really emerged from her apartment to get the mail or get noodles from her best friend’s shop down the street, which Sun supposed was her one true vice. That was where the prim woman in purple had known to find her, sitting all pleasantly in the back with a cup of steaming green tea like they had a pre-planned lunch date. Sun felt her hackles raise, her hair greasy and disheveled and clothes wrinkled so badly her mother would cover her eyes. The woman had a thick folder on the table, and Sun had a feeling it was about her. She had debated turning on her heel and bolting. But there was really no point-if they knew to find her here, they would surely know where she’d live. Cautiously, she made her way over to her usual table, yanking her chair out with a sharp screech. 

“My name is Pauling,” the woman had said not unkindly, sticking her hand out to shake. 

If the intent was to embarrass her with the thick file of everything illegal she’d ever done, it was working. Sun became more and more convinced by the minute that the woman was stalling her and they were raiding her apartment. She either hadn’t been as carefully untraceable as she had thought, or someone had ratted on her, or they had ways of probing that she had no power to protect against.

“All of this can go away forever, Miss Woo. You can start over, with a clean slate.”

“I’m sure there’s something I can do for you to make that happen.”

“Quite correct.” Pauling leaned over the table. “Start over in New Mexico, with us. I’d like to offer you a job.”

Sun had laughed, then, high and shrill with disbelief. “You don’t want my money?”

“On the contrary. We’d like to pay you.”

“What’s the job?”

“That’s classified. Be assured, we feel confident with your skill level that you can complete it. If you take it, we will fill you in with every detail.”

“New Mexico,” Sun mused, rubbing her upper lip. “For how long?”

“We’d like to have you sign a contract for five years, with the clause that extra time may be needed for maintenance.”

So that was it, then, with the little envelope containing one train ticket to New Mexico and a slip of paper with the amount of her first paycheck on it. It was practically too good to be true. The tech she could get hands on with that money? She could retire early! Sun almost felt like it shouldn’t have been that easy to leave this town, to say goodbye to the noodle shop and whatever jobs she was working on, to call her mother one last time and explain that she couldn’t talk for a long while and was moving to New Mexico. It all was easier than she thought it would be. The unknown and the secrecy didn’t bother her-it was the nature of the line of work, after all, and she had always loved warm weather.

The train lurched and started to move away from the platform, steadily chugging on towards her new life. Sun was humming with nervous excitement. Did they want her to hack, code, rob a bank? It didn’t really matter at this point. The money was speaking, and they’d found the right person with no life to leave behind for the job.

“Excuse me,” she heard, and watched a black-haired woman nudge through the people still finding their seats and loading baggage. “Excuse me.”

“Pauling,” Sun said, surprised, when her seatmate plopped down opposite her. “I thought you were meeting me there.”

“My business here took longer than I thought, so I’m able to ride back with you.”

“Making sure I didn’t flee the coop, huh?” 

Pauling did not seem to sense the joke.

Sun sunk further down in her seat. She watched the woman’s glasses glint in the light as she dug in her bag for a sealed envelope, handing it to Sun over the little table between them without looking at it very much.

“I’d suggest you read over this on the ride there. I’ll be able to give you the most information when we’re actually on TF Industries property. But this is more of an employee handbook, things about your contract. Let me know if you have any questions.”

“Okay. Thanks. Hey, I was thinking, what’s going to happen to all my stuff? At my apartment.”

“Someone will come and put everything into a storage unit at a secure location for you. For clothing, a uniform will be provided to you once we get to the base, and everything else that you need. If there’s anything that will make your situation more comfortable, you can-”

“-submit a request,” Sun guessed. 

A ghost of a smile played across Pauling’s lips. “Correct. Submit a request.”

There was silence, then, the only noise the train rumbling underneath their feet. Sun worked her finger underneath the seal of the packet and broke it open, shimmying out a thick ream of paper stocked with tiny print. Sun flicked her gaze back and forth between the reading she was supposed to be doing and Pauling, who was intently concentrating on something she was filling out. A tendril of hair, loose from her bun, waved from behind the woman’s ear like a farewell.


	2. Chapter 2

Miss Pauling did not utilize the brake pedal as they sped past the sleepy town of Teufort, still coming to life although it was already mid-afternoon. The work they were doing was not enjoyed very much by the townsfolk, she explained briefly. Sun wondered exactly what kind of work they were doing that disturbed them, all the way down in the valley. On the train ride, she had dutifully made her way through most of the packet. There were a lot of fancy words and evasive descriptions and she still felt like she didn’t have a great idea of what she had signed up for. Sun wanted to joke that she should have brought a lawyer, but she didn’t trust Pauling would find it very funny. She kept saying she would explain it all when they were there. Sun assumed she wanted to be out of the earshot of the public. When they finally arrived to There, Sun pretended not to be looking too much as the other woman hopped out of the idling truck, started digging her heels into the ground pulling on a rock, which really turned out to be a painted panel on a track. After she pushed it shut behind them, they came upon a big compound up in the hills, all rising wood like someone was trying to bring the forest to the desert. Sun craned her neck as rays of light glinted off new clean panes of glass.

“All right.” Miss Pauling exhaled when she turned off the engine, the two of them sitting there in the cabin of the truck, the air conditioning sputtering out pitifully. “I appreciate your patience. My employers prefer me to not speak about the work we’re doing here too much outside of their property. We’re running an organized war here. You don’t have to worry about any of that, you’re not participating in it, just sort of working in the background, behind the scenes. You’ll be operating the system that makes this all possible. It’s sort of half-designed. We’d like you to finish it, while the base it still vacant and we’re still rounding everyone up. And then use it in action.”

“What kind of system?” Sun asked, her fingers spider-walking across her knee. She was sweating in the New Mexico heat, prickly warmth an uncomfortable layer between her clothes and skin.

“You will load DNA copies of the men that are working here into this system, and when they die, it will kickstart a re-loading of the last updated copy.”

“It makes people immortal? Sign me up.”

A smile hurried across Miss Pauling’s face like an agitated racehorse. “You won’t be in any danger of death. The system, we’re calling it Revival Electronic System Preserving All Within Norms, there’s a lot we don’t know about it yet. You’ll have to report back to us about any side effects, anything like that. Fix it if it breaks. Make it faster and more effective when you can.”

“You have got to think of a shorter name.” Sun scoffed. “That’s a mouthful. How about R.E.S.P.A.WN.?”

“Respawn,” Miss Pauling said slowly, testing the weight of the word in her mouth. “All right, respawn it is. Let’s get you to work.”

 

Sun welcomed the cool kiss of the air conditioning on her skin once they got inside the base. It rather reminded her of a hospital, all sterile, empty halls with security cameras blinking ominously from the ceiling. Sun had a feeling that she would get lost on her own, and placidly followed behind Miss Pauling as she wound her way through the maze with some invisible map. 

“This is only part of the base,” the other woman explained, heels clicking on the floor over Sun’s footfalls. “No fighting. The mess area, beds, medbay, things like that. I’ll show you around the battleground later, if you’d like.”

The battleground. It all sounded so serious yet on the edge of ridiculous, like Miss Pauling was leading her around, seeing how much she could make up before Sun would call her bluff. They visited everything, all untouched and draped in plastic sheeting until it would be used, hopefully a few months later. Miss Pauling told her that she herself would also be staying here until everything was wrapped up, and that Sun was free to use the kitchen and main showers before changing to the women’s when the war started. Twice-monthly supply trucks would keep them fed. The finale, as Miss Pauling put it, was Sun’s office, where she would be spending eighty percent of her time. They had to walk down to the near other end of the base, Sun’s room and the women’s bathrooms being pointed out casually as they passed. 

The respawn room looked rather like a fishbowl, Sun thought. 

It was a circular room with some curved glass set up around a raised platform. Most everything was still in cardboard boxes. There was a big desk in the shape of a half moon in the middle of the room, and to the right, something that looked like a glass shower stall, complete with a curtain. As they stepped up onto the platform that held the desk, edging around the glass, Sun gazed upon countless monitors, all different sizes, and rectangular outlines where she assumed panels of buttons and switches would go. It felt like being in a space station. She was giddy.

“...over here,” Miss Pauling was saying. “It’s up to you where everything goes, of course, but we’ll give you supplies for the camera system all around the battleground and base and spawning room. There will be monitors for checking on individual parts of the systems. Anything else you think would be appropriate, really.”

Sun’s eyes settled on a clipboard that had fallen underneath the desk, papers sagging over themselves. She knelt to pick it up and caught a glimpse of a messy scrawl on graph paper before Miss Pauling’s arm shot out like a piston and took it from her.

“Sorry about that, must have missed it when moving all this stuff in. And a chair! We’ll get you a chair.” she said brightly. “The last of things I ordered should be coming in another week. I hope you’ll have enough to start tinkering around with, but a lot of it will just be thinking it out and math, I assume. The starting plans we have for this, I’ll drop them by your room tonight. Let me go make a call, and I can meet you back here for the rest of the tour?”

“Sure.” Sun answered with a warm smile, and when Miss Pauling left, strolled around the room like she would a park, looking at the furniture appreciatively. She trailed her fingers across the glass tube, leaving smudges that she hurriedly buffed off with her sleeve. When her eyes re-focused through the glass, they fell on a dried splatter of something that looked very much like blood just beyond the tube, connecting floor and wall in a dark maroon stain.

“All right,” Miss Pauling said breathlessly from behind her, all too sudden, “Ready?”


	3. Chapter 3

It was hard to believe that it had been months. 

Time seemed to abandon her. Sun would lay down on her belly on the floor of her workroom with a pad of paper and a pen, and muse on the different ways around a problem. Suddenly, too suddenly, it would be nighttime, and her stomach would roar for more fuel, although she had not really done anything that day at all. Sun felt guilty at times for the days she really could have been doing more, but somehow, miraculously, the room and the system that was its skeleton was rising up around her. It felt as if one morning she walked in, blinking through the intense steam of her coffee, and it was almost complete. Sun felt more tired than she had ever felt in her life. She was being challenged, after all, to solve a problem that she had no help on, and was essentially creating from scratch a system to bring people back from the dead. Sometimes, alone in the womens’ shower, she laughed about it. She would place her hands on the warming white tile, and snicker to the ceiling in the rising steam. Look at her, raising the dead, when it felt like just yesterday she had been eating takeout on a break from writing simple software. The feeling of being isolated on a space station grew within her like a helium balloon. She was doing work she could never tell anyone else about, and some part of her wilted at the missed opportunity to rub her success in others’ faces. But it was enough to live on to just be asked to be here, to work on this utterly futuristic and unreal project, to develop technology she thought was practically beyond her time. 

She was glad Miss Pauling did not shower at the same time as her. She might’ve been axed. But Sun supposed she was probably safe. There were other weird habits she had, and she hadn’t been kicked out yet, despite all of them being watched on those damn beady-eyed cameras that were absolutely everywhere. 

It was hard to believe some of the questions she hadn’t stopped to think about months ago. Sun had brought up human trials recently, when Miss Pauling was having her coffee in the kitchen. To be told the subject supply was already taken care of might have made her a little uneasy when she started, but she had gotten at least a little used to the way things worked around here. She wondered what poor idiots had been suckered into it, but she couldn’t think about those things anymore. Maybe that was part of why they picked her, because her humanity would go away at the first whiff of a paycheck. Sun shrugged, and let herself sink into the river of time.

“You wanted to see me?” Miss Pauling asked her, materializing in the doorway. Sun had gotten used to living with the other woman, as little as they saw of each other, but still jumped about a foot, banging her head inside the hollow body of a computer she was assembling.

“Ow. Yeah. I think we could start the trials next week.”

“Really? Oh, that’s wonderful. You’re really ahead of schedule.”

“I aim to please. But that doesn’t mean it’ll be ready for combat usage right away. If anything goes wrong, or even...I mean, the long term effects of this thing haven’t been studied.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Miss Pauling said brightly, holding on to her initial enthusiasm for dear life. “You don’t need to worry about the long term effects.”

“A short war is great and all, but then, long term could be like a week.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Miss Pauling repeated, the edges of her smile sinking. “It’ll all be taken care of.”

So Sun did her usual shrug, you sign the paychecks, and went back to work. It occurred to her that the brisk, businesslike side of Miss Pauling that she was exposed to was who she was paid to be, and that the other woman might have no goddamn idea what they were doing either, in the middle of an empty base in New Mexico. Sun could respect her dedication to her job. It was the two of them, then, pretending like they knew what they were doing, putting people into this thing.

The day came faster than she ever really expected it would, and they were both a little pale, Sun moving around the room, checking gauges and switches for the tenth time, jittering on too many cups of coffee. There were a few more men from Mann Co. that came to help with the testing process, and Sun felt suddenly awkward in her coffee-stained tee shirt and sweatpants, but they didn’t seem to mind terribly much. It occured to Sun very quickly that they were waiting for her to say something, to do something, to direct. She stood elevated above them all on the dais, fist raised above an unassuming button that would kill the power, like some sort of sleepless dictator.

“Bring the first one in,” she said a little quieter than she would have liked, clearing her throat for emphasis.

Sun would like to say in the future that she remembered the face of the first, but perhaps they had chosen someone purposefully unremarkable, so that no one would notice or remember if he disappeared off the face of the Earth to serve as a subject in a probably wildly illegal human trial. Sun wasn’t sure what to say to him. She managed a smile that looked more like a grimace, and gestured for him to stand across the room.

“I’ll just take your scan now. Please hold still.”  
Sun had one eye closed as she hit the button to have him scanned; she half expected him to start screaming as he was boiled from the inside from radiation of some kind. But nothing happened, and the progress bar went blissfully quickly on her monitor, finally creating a revolving silhouette of his figure for her to exhale in relief at.

“All right. So, what would happen now, theoretically, if you died, is that in a minute or so you could respawn here.”

No one said anything, and Sun opened her mouth again. “I-”

Miss Pauling raised her arm in one swift, silent motion and shot the subject in the back of the head. He crumpled to the ground, crimson spray coating the back of the scanner. The next minute seemed to pass agonizingly slowly, and Miss Pauling even came up to stand next to her on the dais, watching the screen with interest. Sun couldn’t take her eyes off the pistol held calmly at her side, and only became aware that she was shaking when the other woman reached up to place a hand on her shoulder.

“I’m sorry, Sun. I should have warned you.” she said softly. “What should happen now?”

Sun gathered herself. “I didn’t think about it before, but there should be a countdown. I can add that. He should just...pop back in, at any moment. I-”

There was indeed a pop, and it made perhaps all of them in the room jump when the form of the subject materialized suddenly, for some reason spread-eagle against the ceiling. He fell in a heap, a sickening crunch rattling through all of her ears at what was probably his wrist breaking, and stared at Sun for a few minutes, blinking, and she could only blink back. All of them, shocked, like a group of deer in headlights. There were tests to be run, of course, neurological and physical effects and this and that. But the important thing was that it had worked, it had actually worked. Sun felt rather like shouting with exuberance and jumping off her desk, but contained the impulse. The men Miss Pauling had brought with her recovered from their surprise and hoisted the man up while a third brought in a gurney that was probably designed for a different outcome. They left, then, the subject clutching his wrist, looking all the world like a man who had seen the other side and come back.

“Well,” Sun finally said, turning to Miss Pauling, “Well.”


	4. Chapter 4

Sun imagined this would be how she felt if she had children and was sending them off on their first day of school, hoping that they didn’t murder anyone in a horrific, radiation-activated explosion. Something like that. A crew had come in overnight and really spiffed the place up for her. Sun was almost expecting a mint on the desk. She had re-designed the scanner booth, added a countdown, and she’d figured out how to change the spawning point. It was easier to simply tweak the system now that it was built(by her hand, nonetheless), and there was a certain point where she was pacing the room with a pair of needlenose pliers in her hand, feeling there must be something else to tweak. Human trials had proceeded steadily once she fixed the issues they’d had, and the monitoring of the subjects was occuring in some other department of Mann Co. that she didn’t get to see. Sun supposed she was satisfied with the weekly reports they were courteous enough to send her, and so far, everything was going well. It was going so well Sun felt like at any moment, something must blow up and take all of them to hell under a pile of twisted metal. How had no one died? Permanently?

Miss Pauling had asked her if she could make the system faster, and she’d made it faster. It was down from a little over a minute to anywhere from five to fifteen seconds, on average. Sometimes longer, sometimes shorter. They had discovered that the more brutal a death, the longer the reconstruction took. Sometimes, frustratingly, the system would just lag a little for no reason she could discover, or recover a body exceedingly fast. Miss Pauling said it didn’t matter. Sun felt like it mattered, but held her tongue.

It was a Thursday that she first tried on her uniform. It had arrived a week or two ago, but Sun had hesitated to get out of her sweatpants, knowing it probably said something about her psyche that she was avoiding taking the final step to assimilating fully into her project. She’d been able to choose from an oddly futuristic catalogue a long-sleeved dress that looked comfortable enough. Sun turned back and forth in front of the mirror several times, as if a skin had been shed, and felt as if she looked wildly out of place. Anyone from her hometown would see through this in an instant. It was the final day, this Thursday, where they were testing the range of the respawn system. It was going to be boring enough. She would sit in her wing-backed chair that Sun liked quite a lot because it made her look like a movie villain, watch cameras, and make sure things were up to par. She made her way into the respawn room and up onto the dais, smoothing out the front of her dress as she sat. Miss Pauling was already waiting, and smiled at her over the edge of her clipboard. “You look nice,” she said, having made no previous comment about Sun not wearing her uniform.

“If today goes well,” she continued, scribbling away, “I wanted to ask if you would prefer to come along to the other bases we’re installing the system in, or stay here and oversee the mother, as we’re calling it.”

“Other bases?” Sun asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Of course. There’s lots. This war, it’s very spread out over multiple territories. Different strongholds. We’ve got to install this in all of them, and we’re happy to have you if you’re particular about watching it be installed. Or, you can stay here.”

“Oh. Thanks for asking. I suppose I’d like to stay with the original, making sure it’s working okay. I can do a check-up on the system as each base when we move there? If I’m moving with the group.”

“Oh yes, yes, you are. That’s just fine with us. Splendid. Things are moving well with getting our mercenaries, too. Things are moving quite fast. My employer is really pleased with your work.”

“I aim to please,” Sun said, one eye on the cameras. Two men from Mann Co. were shepherding a woman into the sewers. It occurred to her suddenly that soon she would cease to be alone. There would be people here, fighting a war, and everyone would be trusting her to make sure they continued to pop back into existence, over and over, over and over. Her palms grew sweaty.  
Miss Pauling had neglected to mention when the mercenaries would be finished with their extensive briefing and arrive at Teufort. Evidence of the human trials and the men that had helped her with the whole process disappeared. Miss Pauling withdrew, too, the things in her room disappearing overnight. Sun paced the base like a caged animal, continually smoothing down the front of her dress, almost afraid to take it off for fear they would appear any moment. She wasn’t one to care what others thought of her. At least, she believed so. It became unpleasantly apparent that this was so because she was on the other side of a screen where it did not matter what she was wearing, and she was better than anyone in the field. Here, treading unknown ground and actually having to make an appearance, was different.

It happened when she had thrown her hands in the air on the third day since she was left to her own devices and decided to go to bed. She trudged to the kitchen sometime after midnight, rubbing a bleary eye, and settled at the table with a bowl of cereal. Sun was mid-mouthful, reading the not very promising nutrition facts on the back of the box, when a very large man somehow silently materialized in the doorway, filling the doorframe, and settling his gaze on her that she could feel through the dark. She had had a home invader, once, when she was in college. Someone broke into her room and taken her two computers and three monitors. Sun was lucky enough to not be in the room when it was happening, and was far along enough in school to know how to ruin his life, but had always wondered what she would have done. Maybe it was a scrawny enough kid that she could have tossed him out the window or something. Any delusions of grandeur that she had suddenly wilted when she looked at the man’s size, and her cereal spoon clattered into her bowl. He could snap her neck with one hand, if he wished.

The giant raised a palm. “Hello,” he said. “Sorry to frighten you.”

“I didn’t think you would be coming in the middle of the night,” Sun answered, well aware he was probably unaware of the relief that was flooding her body. 

He shrugged. “Train was delayed.”

“Can you move, man?” Someone complained from in the hallway, and the man moved, releasing more people into the kitchen like the opening of a valve. They were an assorted bunch, for sure, one in a suit and one looking like he had just come from baseball practice, and none of them looked like they were going to the same place. The one in a gas masked cocked their head and pointed a curious finger at her.

“Pardon our rudeness,” one of them said in a soft Southern drawl, “I wasn’t aware they had added on a tenth mercenary.”

“I’m not a mercenary,” Sun answered hurriedly, and felt the strong and ridiculous urge to put her hands in the air. “I run the respawn system.”

 

It was odd having others around the base, an explosion of life that made Sun realize how alone she had truly felt, even with Miss Pauling there. She was almost afraid to come out of her room for fear that she would collide with someone in the hallway. So she stood behind her door, in the half-dark, probably forgotten about, and it dawned that this was just another job working in the shadows. Sun was best behind the scenes. She made an effort not to think about this time an error in code could cost a life. They were to start the next morning, one of the mercenaries loudly reminded everyone, bright and early. 

Sun felt a little creepy watching them on the cameras, her chin propped on her hand like she was surveying her lands. They were very busy unpacking and stocking the kitchen. She jumped like one that has been caught guilty when the door opened.

“Hello,” one of them said, and offered her a cheerful wave. It was the same man that had the Southern accent, a shorter fellow with a pair of welding goggles on his forehead and a singular protective glove. “I’m the Engineer. You’re the legend herself, then?”

“I wouldn’t say that just yet.” Sun answered hastily. “Let me keep it running without the whole thing blowing up, and then maybe.”

He laughed, and she could tell it was easy-coming. “Mind if I check it out? My fingers have been itching to see how this thing operates.”

“It’s open to the public,” she said, a little awkwardly.

Sun kept her eyes on him and off the cameras as he perused the room, hands clasped behind his back like he was in a museum. 

“How fast have you gotten it?”

“It varies,” she answered automatically. “Average is around eight seconds.”

The Engineer whistled. “That’s fast. I’ll talk to our doc, we need to get these copies loaded up. He’s got to do the surgery first, though.”

“Surgery?”

“Yes ma’am. Part of why they grabbed him. He was working on technology to make a man invulnerable for a short time, with the right tools. You need heart surgery, though, as he tells me.”

“Sounds like a good tradeoff.”

“Hopefully it will be.” he answered, easily. “You mind if I ask a couple more questions?”

She did not say no. Sun answered to the best of her ability. His face was carefully neutral, and he gave simple responses between each answer. She felt like she was being quizzed. She did not know whether the answers she gave were the right ones or the wrong ones. It started to move into choices about the system that had been about personal preference and experience. Sun wondered if he was intentionally trying to make her sweat.

“Well,” he said finally, after a long silence, “I should go talk to the doc. I expect he’ll start funneling everyone here when they’ve had their surgery and intake, so be ready.”

Sun did not know how it was possible someone would walk down the hall to her after heart surgery, but did not say anything, and watched the door close behind the Engineer.


End file.
